Example research essay topic: Fall In Love Hillary Clinton - 2,170 words

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Florentino Area, the protagonist in Gabriel Garcia Marquezs Love in the Time of Cholera, finds himself smitten in his youth with another adolescent, Fermina Data. She returns his affections and the two begin a secret love affair. They manage to keep their relationship hidden for several months, but Fermina's father eventually catches wind of it. He orders Florentino to stop seeing his daughter and admonishes Fermina, telling her that she can find someone better to love than a poor poet. He sends her away to the countryside to forget the affair. Harry Frankfurt, in a discussion entitled On Caring, takes exception to such treatment.

He writes that, The significance to us of caring is more basic than the importance to us of what we care about. 1 In other words, if we can love someone, we should love himFerminas father should have been happy that she could love Florentino. Susan Wolfe, however, has recently argued that this position is unacceptable. 2 Surely, she contends, we can imagine situations in which we would want to tell someone that she should not love another person, that she can do better. I am inclined to agree with Wolfe that such circumstances do arise, but I think that her position can be made stronger. In this paper, I would like to explore grounds for telling anyone why she should or should not love something, be it another person, a piece of music, or even a type of literature.

I will focus my first section on a discussion of instrumental versus intrinsic love. I will then turn, in the second section, to Frankfurt's position and Wolfe's subsequent response. I will use their debate as a framework to introduce, in the third and fourth sections, respectively, two considerations that will establish my position: the joint concepts of sense history and objective relational values. The final section will address several objections to my view. It should be kept in mind throughout, however, that it is not my intention to produce an all-encompassing view of love or even to define it.

The term enjoys such widespread usage that such an effort may be impossible. What I hope to explain is why we should or should not love certain things. 1 Before I begin, however, I would like to draw a distinction between instrumental and intrinsic love. One reason why I suspect that discussions about love are so confusing is the oft-unacknowledged influence of Freudwe are used to thinking of love in sexual, and, therefore, usually instrumental terms. While this reading may be justified in some contexts, I think that one way to separate the two notions is to consider love of ideas or activities. This permits us to admit more than one type of desire (sexual) into our system, while allowing us to address interpersonal relationships once we shore up our intuitions in other cases. It can be argued, however, that even the love of ideas or activities is simply an instrumental satisfaction of, albeit more complicated, desires.

While I am willing to admit that we may indeed fall in love for instrumental reasons, I do not think that this precludes the transformation of these motives into intrinsic ones. This stance, of course, directly denies psychological hedonism, so I will briefly touch on that position in what follows. Subscribers to the psychological hedonist explanation of human motivation who range from Kant to Freudhold that all actions are done for pleasure. One might respond by pointing out that there seem to be many decisions say, helping a friend at some cost to youth are carried out altruistically.

Such actions would be carried out for intrinsic reasons, independent of any value for ones self. A psychological hedonist might respond, however, that this is impossible: all actions carry an instrumental value, even if it is only the agreeable feeling one gets from helping a friend. It is at this point, however, that their position begins to break down. If it true that altruistic deeds are really done for instrumental reasons, then we might imagine the following problem. Suppose we gave Nelson Mandela the option of having all the pleasure he got from freeing South Africa from apartheid without actually having to do it. He would probably not take up our offer.

There seems to be something intrinsically valuable in Nelson Mandelas actions, something that could not be satisfied if we simply gave him the instrumental pleasure. I think that love acts in a similar manner while it is often instrumental, in some cases the beloved has an intrinsic value. Clearly the argument over psychological hedonism is an important one and deserves further treatment than that given here. But, as long as we accept that the beloved can be loved intrinsically, the argument I will present stands outside of an instrumental framework. 2 Consider, then, the case of Eponine in Victor Hugo's Les Miserables. In the course of the 1832 French uprising, Eponine finds herself behind a street barricade with her beloved, Marius. He, however, is in love with another character, Cassette, and asks Eponine to take a letter to her.

Eponine, concerned with Marius happiness, not only delivers the letter, but also saves Cassettes father from robbery. On her return to the barricade, however, she is shot and killed. The type of concern Eponine shows for Marius well being motivates Frankfurt's notion of love: it is the desire to see the object of ones affection flourish. In his scheme, love is a disinterested mode of caring must be a concern in which the good of the beloved is desired for its own sake rather than for the sake of promoting any other interests. 3 For example, we might adjust our view of Eponine if we discovered that her concern toward Marius was motivated by money. Frankfurt's position matches well with our intuitions that love affects the way we behave toward our beloved and changes how we order our own preferences. But does it tell us if we should love certain things?

Not fact, Frankfurt's answer to his own question, What makes it more suitable, then, for a person to make one object rather than another important to himself, is, It seems that it must be the fact that it is possible for him to care about the one and not about the other. 4 On this view, it is reason enough to care for something because we can care about it, never mind what it is. Implicit in this stance is that we ought not to consider whether something is worthy of our love, just whether we are able to care about it. I think Frankfurt designs his view to support the intuition that it is disingenuous for love to reflect worth, but that he does so to an extreme. While there seems to be something wrong with parents who love one of their children above the other based on intelligence, we want to be able to tell an abused wife that she should not go on loving her belligerent husband.

If I fall in love with a serial killer or some dubious activity, is there a point at which we think that the object of my affection may not be worth my love? If we answer yes to Jefferson Airplanes question, Dont you want somebody to love? should we have a minimum criterion for possible candidates? Does Frankfurt's view imply that, if I can love almost everything, I should love almost everything? These questions give us reason to suspect that Frankfurt has not accurately categorized love. Susan Wolfe addressing these concerns suggests that we can clarify Frankfurt's position by carving out grounds for an objective evaluation of love.

She argues that, while it may be difficult to address cases in the middle, we do have reason to tell people that, they can do better, in extreme circumstances. That is, ones love of a person or object or activity should be proportional to its value or worthiness to be loved. One should love that which is most deserving. In the same way that teaching is presumably a better vocation than attempting to break the world record in long-distance spitting, there are sharply contrasting cases in which one person or activity is more worthy of our attentions than another. We should become worried if someone we know decides he loves Nazis or takes up sadism in his spare time. We should encourage him to develop a love of something more worthy.

In cases in the middle, however, Wolfe's argument begins to break down. If I enjoy an activity like running for its own sake while my best friend takes pleasure in golf, it does not make much sense for us to sit down and try to convince each other that one pursuit is better. In the same way, if I am interested in Garcia Marquez but my friend only reads Tolstoy, I lack grounds to tell him that my literary activities are more worthy than his. The same problem applies to the people we love: it does not make sense to say that I should value Hillary Clinton over my girlfriend because Hillary is smarter or more powerful, etc.

Although Wolfe presents a compelling argument for adding normative features to our considerations of love, she is hindered in her efforts by the assumption that worth is wholly a quality of the desired object. She is too focused on avoiding the argument that there are objective standards for comparing things like intelligence to kindness or activities like running and golf. She does not want to assign a value to qualities or pursuits that cannot be normatively quantified. Wolfe would do better, however, to allow for subjectivity in the things people love, but argue for objectivity in telling people when they should or should not love something.

This is precisely the position I intend to take; I will begin by arguing for the existence of subjective sense histories and continue my discussion with the notion of objective relational values. 3 Psychologists often use the concept of sense pictures when referring to episodic memory. If, for example, during a vacation in Colorado, I listen to a certain song over and over again, hearing that tune months later will cause me to remember my time there. Flashbacks to traumatic events can be triggered by similar mechanisms the smell of smoke may cause a person to remember a childhood house fire. In the same way that these sense pictures help create histories of events in our lives, we can imagine relationships with other people that create sense histories. 5 Consider the case of the title character in Mario Loss The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto, who is reminded of his wife every time he smells lavender.

Is it possible that the connection exists in the opposite direction, so that every time he thinks of his wife he also remembers the smell of lavender? Almost certainly, but to extend the analogy further, is it plausible that Don Rigoberto can be reminded of specific events when he thinks of his wife? The answer, at least for Loss, is yes. When we think of people who have particularly influenced our lives, we are reminded of the occasions when they did so, for good or for ill. The sum of these events explains why we feel the way we do toward specific individuals. But how can the notion of sense history clarify why we should or should not love certain things?

I think that the first issue that sense history must address is that some histories make us hate other people or events and some leave us indifferent. Returning to the case of the house fire, it is unlikely that the person suffering from flashbacks associates smoke with an enjoyable event in her past. Rather, she goes out of her way to avoid such sensations. In the same way, we may associate a particular location with a person we despise and take pains to steer clear of the area. We also have momentary relationships with things and people all the time, but do not have any particular like or dislike for them. It seems, then, that sense histories cannot help us with love since they can be positive, negative, or even neutral occurrences.

This is not, however, an insurmountable problem. We seem to have an intuition that, if two people fall in love, they must have a good history together they recall agreeable events when thinking of each other. This is why it does not make sense to say that I should love Hillary Clinton over my girlfriend Hillary has not dated me for the last two years, we have not shared walks on the beach, and we have not even met. In short, I should love my girlfriend because we have a good sense history together while Hillary and I have a fairly indifferent one. Sense history can also help us sort out the case of running versus golf. While we may not be able to decide whether running is objective...

Research essay sample on Fall In Love Hillary Clinton